OBITUARY: Renata Babak, 69, opera star who defected from the Bolshoi (01/18/04)

OBITUARY

Renata Babak, 69, opera star who defected from the Bolshoi

SlLVER SPRING, Md. - Renata Babak, the internationally known mezzo-soprano who defected from the Bolshoi Opera in 1973, died at her home in Silver Spring, Md., on Declember 31, 2003, at the age of 69.

Ms. Babak was born in Kyiv and studied at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg). She was a soloist at the Kyiv Opera and subsequently at the Leningrad Opera, performing in Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Canada.

An international star with 10 years' experience at the Bolshoi, she defected while the opera company was playing at La Scala in Milan. As reported in the January 2 issue of The Washington Post, "Ms. Babak, who had been prohibited by the Soviet secret police from traveling outside the Soviet Union for the previous six years," was ultimately able to evade the agents who kept her under surveillance. The great escape occurred after the first act of Mussorgsky's five-act opera "Khovanshchina," followed by immigration to Canada, where Ms. Babak was in hiding for two years.

Ms. Babak's U.S. debut in Carnegie Hall in 1975 garnered enthusiastic reviews. Her voice was described (in 1982) as "both big and sweet, tremendously powerful and superbly controlled in its upper register, with only a small, piquant touch of the vibrato so often over-indulged by Russian singers."

After her initial move to New York, she left for Washington at the invitation of George London, then general director of the Washington Opera. However, Mr. London's death cut short the prospect of collaboration. Ms. Babak joined the faculty of the Washington Conservatory of Music and, according to The Washington Times, "gave recitals and sang roles that critics said did not often offer her the chance to use her extraordinary voice to its fullest."

Music critic Joseph McLellan wrote in The Washington Post in 1984: "Babak's career has been nowhere near as spectacular as her talent deserved. She has an extraordinary mezzo-soprano voice, retaining its power in the dramatic soprano range, and it has won critical superlatives wherever (all too seldom) she has performs - in the Washington area usually at concerts connected with human-rights causes."

As noted in The Washington Post, "The KGB had undermined her career before she defected, not only by prohibiting foreign appearances, but also by failint to publicize her appearances and by prohibiting her from singing Ukrainian pieces."

"In 1979, when the Soviet Embassy sponsored an exhibit of Russian art at the Renwick Gallery, Embassy officials very publicly canceled the exhibit because Ms. Babak was scheduled to perform nearby," The Post noted.

Ever since her defection, Ms. Babak continued to be an outspoken critic of Soviet repression. In 1986 Ms. Babak, who ultimately was able to contact her parents in Kyiv at the time of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant disaster, gave press interviews condemning the Soviet government's handling of the crisis.

Ms. Babak became a U.S. citizen in 1993 and taught Russian for 10 years, until 2001, through an Agriculture Department program.

Her last opera perforance was in 1997 in Tchaikovsky's "Iolanta" with Opera Camerata of Washington. She continued to sing recitals until 2002.

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